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A Mother on Surviving the Tet Offensive and Escaping from Vietnam

On January 31, 1968, Lan Cao’s family was living just outside of Saigon, getting ready to celebrate the Lunar New Year of Tet. Instead, her father — a military commander — had to rush off to war.

The North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong had launched a surprise attack on her city and over one hundred other South Vietnamese locations. This became known as the Tet Offensive, and was one of the biggest military campaigns of the Vietnam War, which led to a decline in public support in the United States.

Lan was 7 years old. She and her family would eventually resettle in the US. Lan graduated magna cum laude from Mount Holyoke and earned a law degree from Yale. She’s now a professor of international economics law and lives in California.

At StoryCorps, Lan sat down with her teenage daughter, Harlan Van Cao. Harlan was 12 at the time of their interview — just a year shy of the age Lan was when she arrived in the United States. Lan shared what it was like to live under siege before rebuilding her life in America.

Top photo: Harlan Van Cao and her mother Lan Cao at their StoryCorps interview in Westminster, California.

Bottom photo: Lan Cao’s passport from the Republic of Vietnam, also known as South Vietnam. Courtesy of Lan Cao.

This interview came through the First Days Story Project, recorded in partnership with WGBH and PBS American Experience.

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Lan Cao (LC): There was so much fighting very near our house. You could hear automatic gunfire, the sky would be lit up with explosions at night. And then my grandfather was a landlord and was captured by the Viet Cong. They killed him and my father found that my grandfather had been beheaded, and they had put his head onto the body of a pig.

Harlan Van Cao (HVC): What do you remember about the day you left Vietnam?

LC: My parents told me that I’m just going on a short trip with Papa Fritz. He’s sort of like a second dad for me. And he was gonna take me to Connecticut to be with his family for maybe a few weeks. So, so I packed up my stamp collection and some books and that was it.

HVC: What was something you really wanted to bring but you couldn’t?

LC: I wanted to bring my dog, Topaz, he was a German shepherd. But they killed the dog.

HVC: Why?

LC: I don’t know why, they killed the dog.

HVC: Was it hard for you to adapt to your surroundings when you arrived?

LC: Well, I would watch the American nightly news and see that each city was falling. That was when I realized that, oh my God, I’m not going back to Vietnam, and I’m going to be stuck living in this country without my parents. I was only 13. So, that was when I began to seriously learn English. And I started going to the library, reading books, taping shows on a cassette tape and then putting it under the pillow and playing it overnight so that I would just absorb the language. You know, life is like a lotus flower. The lotus flower lives in mud and is open and blooms. If you come as a refugee with nothing, no matter what trauma you went through during the war, no matter what you have lost, you have to have the mental toughness to start over and to succeed. That’s what I’m most proud of: that I did not collapse and I’m able to pass that on to you.